Team:Exeter/Diary/wk4

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9th-13th July 2012

We kicked off the week with our now routine group meetings where we discussed our change of plans and the division of labour in the labs. Each of our four biologists is now leading their own “mini” assignment whilst being supported by one another they have each also enlisted their very own physicist! Finally our primers are sorted and have been ordered!

This week saw the team having a short tour of the labs that we’ll be stationed in for the duration of the summer by Dagmara.

Liam, after spending many an interesting hour in the library over the last few weeks has been trawling through plenty of online tutorials trying to make sense of coding with Python and using the SQLite3 module. A process I think he will admit that he has secretly enjoyed! With his wealth of obtained knowledge he has begun his first attempt at our database program.

He’s taken a modular approach to assembly, taking his time with each individual element. The first model consisted of a program that took three sugars as user input and produced two separate lists of potential enzymes that could be used to conjoin sugar one to two and two to three respectively. After his visit to John Rowe he was able to implement several quick improvements, for instance the addition of error messages if the combination is impossible. Liam intends on making further improvements to his code with the hope of incorporating the ability to add any number of input sugars. The aim of the finished product which will hopefully be included in our wiki will require him learning code from another module called JPython... “Yay!” For a more detailed evaluation of the Database please visit our section on the wiki.

Work in labs finally commenced by transforming Escherichia coli to bulk up some promoters, terminators and other useful things for BioBrick assembly! The next morning our previous labour was checked to make sure everything had worked properly. Thankfully it had as Tom was unsure how he would deliver a pep talk had we of failed! The plated colonies were left in the fridge until the afternoon where they were transferred to broth culture for further incubation.

For full details of our work in the lab, please visit the lab book section.